Gigabyte sent us two motherboards, both of which use their Ultra Durable design. Like previous motherboards from the company, the surrounding panels of the packaging are full of information. Gigabyte lists the new features of the Ultra Durable 4 design along their new 3D power and BIOS technologies on the front of the box, and all the main supported features are listed at the bottom.

The back panel is essentially a deep dive into the features of the motherboard and it would be surprising if Gigabyte left anything unmentioned. This panel has details regarding their 3D Power all Digital engine, 3D dual UEFI BIOS and their Ultra Durable 4 design along with a ton of other features included with the motherboard.

Since this model fits more into the mid-range market, it does not come with massive bundle. Instead it comes only with two SATA 3G cables, two SATA 6G cables, an SLI bridge, the rear I/O panel and the installation guides.

The Z77X-UD3H is an ATX motherboard featuring a solid black PCB with black expansion slots. The heatsinks are blue in color, which adds a nice contrast to the black and makes the heatsinks really standout. The board also has an incredibly spacious layout with all the PCIe lanes having ample spacing between them and the CPU area, and there is also enough space between the memory DIMMs and the socket. This will ensure even large heatsinks can be used without limiting the memory and graphics card support.

The Gigabyte board uses their latest Ultra Durable 4 design which increases the lifespan of the motherboard as well as improves efficiency by using components such as Ferrite core chokes, Low RDS MOSFET, Japanese solid capacitors, and two layers of 2x copper in the inner layers. The design also utilizes a dual BIOS design with backup BIOS recovery.

The Z77X-UD3H supports all Intel LGA 1155 based processors in the i7, i5 and i3 family and has the necessary outputs to support the built-in IGP. To ensure the installed CPU has an adequate amount of power, the Gigabyte UD3H uses a 9 phase unit design in a 9+2 configuration and there is mid-sized heatsink on the VRM. Additionally, the Ultra Durable 4 design includes an all Digital PWM controller array to deliver power to the board's microprocessor.This will ensure more precise power delivery to the motherboard's most power hungry components, thus improving the power efficiently. The on-board heatsink is also an important piece of the puzzle as it lowers the overall temperature of the voltage regulation modules and increase the stability and overclocking potential.

In total the Z77X-UD3H can support up to 32GB of memory rated up to 2666MHz OC. The memory slots on the Z77X-UD3H use an all-black color scheme, so like the ECS board there is no specific color coding per memory channel. To run in dual channel mode, the two memory modules must be placed in the proper DIMMs.

One feature that Gigabyte has started integrating into all their motherboards is a mini-PCIe slot. These slots are designed for mini-PCIe SSDs and can be used in conjunction with Intel Smart Response and Rapid Start technology. This allows the system to use the SSD as a cache device, so there is no need for a large capacity SSD. Smaller capacity drives are also cheaper than the larger storage models, so it can be a cost-effective means to boosting performance.

The rear expansion options on the Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H consist of a PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, D-Sub port, DVI-D port, a DVI port, optical S/PDIF out connector, HDMI port, DisplayPort, two eSATA 6Gb/s connectors, six USB 3.0/2.0 ports, a RJ-45 LAN connector and six audio jacks. Not too shabby for a mid-range product, especially for anyone planning to use the IGP functionality of either the Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge processors.

At the top right side of the board Gigabyte has included some interesting options for a mid-range motherboard. First off there is a large power button that is located just below two smaller buttons that reset the board and clear the CMOS. Gigabyte has also included multiple real-time voltage checkpoints on the board that can be read with a multi-meter. The checkpoints can be used to gauge the voltage levels of the PCH, DDR VTT, VDIMM, CPU PLL, VSA, CPU VTT and VCore.

The Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H has three PCIe expansion slots that run at x16, x8 and x4 respectively. Additionally, the board also has three PCI x1 slots and a single PCI slot. Both SLI and CrossFire are supported, but this model can only run two graphics cards simultaneously at x16/x8. However, like all the other models in the roundup, Lucid Virtu GPU virtualization technologies are supported. For anyone unfamiliar with the technology, it uses virtualization software to improve your PC's visuals with faster response times, improved video processing and smoother media playback, all within a low power environment. Lucid Universal MVP also features Hyperformance, which eliminates redundant rendering tasks and predicts potential synchronization issues in the graphics delivery pipeline, producing faster frame rates.

The SATA options on the board consist of four SATA 3Gbps and two SATA 6Gbps ports. All of the ports are natively supported by the Z77 chipset which also support RAID 0 through 10 configurations. The two eSATA ports on the board panel though are connected by a Marvell 88SE9172 controller and support RAID 0 and 1 functions.

Comments

Marginal differences between the lot although it's nice to see which is the best Z77 board on the market. To say Asrock are a more budget oriented manufacturer, their Fatal1ty did manage to compete closely. Having said that, most of the performance will come from the things connected to the board, not the board itself. Strange to see it not recieving a recommendation badge though.

Awards are below the final thoughts, only board not to catch one was the stock Intel board from what I can see on the list at the end. Really cool to see ASRock in there too, it seems we're facing a wave of the more budget companies making their effort to really battle it out. ECS recently made their statement with their new return policy shift to really cement their focus.

Awards are below the final thoughts, only board not to catch one was the stock Intel board from what I can see on the list at the end. Really cool to see ASRock in there too, it seems we're facing a wave of the more budget companies making their effort to really battle it out. ECS recently made their statement with their new return policy shift to really cement their focus.